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kirkpatrickry

The strange death of Indian Communism | The Indian Express - 0 views

indianexpress.com/...ange-death-of-indian-communism

communism politics history

shared by kirkpatrickry on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Few can imagine how unlikely this is. From the Fifties to the Seventies, there was serious debate on how imminent the Communist Revolution was in India. The future was red. Now of course no one takes Communists or even Communism seriously. The Soviet Union collapsed without anyone firing a shot. Leninism proved to be a delusion which could not survive the 20th century.
  • Why did Communism fail so abysmally? Marx had a fascination with Capitalism and admired its immense productive potential. He and Engels advertised the advent of globalisation in their youthful Communist Manifesto. His ideal of Socialism was timed for well after the maturity of Capitalism.
  • Communism’s luck continued and Capitalism suffered the Great Depression. It looked like the Revolution was imminent. Lenin had conflated Imperialism and Capitalism. This enhanced the appeal of Communism for the colonies. Stalin consigned millions to concentration camps but the idea that the Soviet Union was the hope of the world remained strong. Victory in the Second World War and then taking over Eastern European countries enhanced the reputation of the Soviet Union. China had its own Revolution which confirmed Lenin’s wisdom that the Communist revolution would start in the backward countries, not developed ones as Marx may have thought. India was supposed to be the next ripe fruit to fall. The CPI had blotted its copybook by supporting the British rulers during the war, as for them the fight was for defence of the Soviet Union. They denounced independence as illusory and launched a premature Revolution in Telangana. Stal
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  • n thought India was not ready for a Revolution. So the Communists began to play the democracy game under orders waiting for the signal to revolt.
jayhandwerk

Russia tries to entice voters to polls to prop up Putin's legitimacy | World news | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ters-to-polls-putin-legitimacy

russia putin world politics culture

shared by jayhandwerk on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • There is little doubt that Vladimir Putin will win a fourth term as president in the election next Sunday, making him the first Kremlin leader since Stalin to serve two decades in power
  • officials across the country are experimenting with raffles, competitions and the occasional referendum – like one in Volgograd that asks voters whether they want to change time zones – all in an effort to ensure Putin wins with greater support than in 2012.
  • The 2018 election may already go down as one of Russia’s most bizarre and inert.
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  • And yet, despite the obvious staging of elements of this campaign, insiders, pollsters, political commentators and opposition members say the government’s legitimacy is on the line.
Javier E

Opinion | We've Been Looking in the Wrong Places to Understand Sanders's Socialism - Th... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bernie-sanders-socialism.html

socialism us idealism politics history culture progressive

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Sanders fits into a strain of American socialism that has largely eschewed ideology, made few references to Karl Marx, and been more likely to talk about fairness and values than about economic theory.
  • He does not sound like the doctrinaire immigrant socialists of the 19th century, for example. He is somewhat closer to Norman Thomas and the socialists of the 1930s or Eugene Debs and the socialism of the early 20th century. But both men headed a socialist party, which Mr. Sanders does not
  • The socialists Mr. Sanders most resembles were Gilded Age intellectuals, reformers, union members and ordinary citizens who self-labeled as socialist.
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  • the leading voices were, like Mr. Sanders, native-born and middle-class advocates of reform within the Democratic and Republican parties, whose bosses they often criticized.
  • Mr. Sanders sounds like these Gilded Age socialists in part because the issues of their time were similar to ours — immigration, environmental deterioration, declining well-being and growing inequality in a period of rapid technological and economic change
  • The Gilded Age socialists admitted what their opponents often did not: Americans did not all share common values.
  • Mr. Sanders’s actual similarity to 19th-century socialists makes him seem unthreatening, even avuncular. He is infinitely closer to William Dean Howells, the 19th-to 20th-century novelist who for a while proclaimed himself a socialist, than to Joseph Stalin.
  • Howells’s political evolution makes socialism’s American roots clear. Howells wrote campaign biographies for Abraham Lincoln and Rutherford B. Hayes, and remained close friends with John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. Even when Howells called himself a socialist in the late 1880s, he continued to vote Republican, although he thought the party was corrupted.
  • Howells regarded socialism as “not a positive but a comparative thing … Every citizen of a civilized State is a socialist.”
  • If anyone believed “that the postal department, the public schools, the mental hospitals, the almshouse are good things; and that when a railroad management has muddled away in hopeless ruin the money of all who trusted it, a Railroad Receiver is a good thing,” then that person embraced socialism.
  • Like Howells, Bernie Sanders embraces a series of modest changes. Mr. Sanders often rightly seems bewildered that free public college education — once the norm in California — and the universal health care of Canada and Europe can seem to be radical solutions to American problems.
  • Radicals — anarchists, Communists and other Marxists — have at critical moments influenced America’s development, often for the better, and most of them have despised American socialists as insufficiently revolutionary, ideologically incoherent, hopelessly sentimental and utterly enmeshed in existing society.
  • They were right — which was why American socialists have been far more influential than their radical critics. Socialists appealed to sensibility, values and justice, not ideologies. They put their hope in the benevolence and fairness of the mass of Americans —­ what Howells called the sufficiency of the common — rather than in elites.
bluekoenig

This photo triggered China's Cultural Revolution - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics history culture mao china communism

shared by bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20
     
    In the 1960's Mao Zedong's influence and health were on the decline in Communist China; many thought he was in very ill health or possibly even dead and his approval was low, which sparked a media campaign thanks to the Yangtze River. The Chinese people were still trying to recover from the Great Leap Forward and the millions of deaths it brought before it's ending. Meanwhile, the SU was going through a period of DeStalinization after the death of Stalin, something Mao did not want after his own death. Mao swam in the Yangtze again to show his health, but it also symbolized the beginning of another huge government campaign, similar to his swim before the implementation of the Great Leap Forward. This time his swim signaled the Cultural Revolution, a campaign to purge government officials not dedicated to Maoism and spark zeal for Mao in the Chinese youth. The Red Gaurd of the Maoist youth went out destroying what they called "the four olds" and rewriting history under Mao. The Cultural Revolution was just as chaotic as Mao's previous campaigns and resulted in countless deaths, but it got Mao what he wanted, respect after his death as opposed to the scrubbing Stalin's history received. His swim symbolized more than his physical strength, it symbolized a revitalization in the Chinese Communist government and his last revolution.
Javier E

Debate Erupts at N.J. Law School After White Student Quotes Racial Slur - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Rutgers-law-school-n-word.html

law school censorship slur racial free speech

shared by Javier E on 03 May 21 - No Cached
  • Rutgers officials willing to talk openly about their opposition to the students’ demands have said that the school, as a public institution, has a greater obligation to safeguard students’ and teachers’ First Amendment right to free speech.
  • The head of the journalism department at Central Michigan University was fired last year after using the same slur when quoting from a lawsuit. An Emory University law school professor was placed on administrative leave for more than a year after using the word in discussions with students about race.
  • Any public use of a racial epithet can carry a risk of steep professional consequences.
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  • “Although we all deplore the use of racist epithets,” said Gary L. Francione, a law professor who also signed the statement, “the idea that a faculty member or law student cannot quote a published court decision that itself quotes a racial or other otherwise objectionable word as part of the record of the case is problematic and implicates matters of academic freedom and free speech.”
  • Among the professors who have signed a statement in support of Professor Bergelson and the student are some of the school’s most prominent faculty members, including John Farmer Jr., a former New Jersey attorney general, and Ronald K. Chen, the state’s onetime public advocate. Both are former deans of Rutgers Law School.
  • rofessor Bergelson, 59, has said that she did not hear the word spoken during the videoconference session, which three students attended after a criminal law class, and would have corrected the student if she had.
  • Professor Bergelson said she was never told about her students’ objections, learning of them only after the petition surfaced April 6, five months later. Within days, she said, she convened a meeting with the criminal law class and other first-year students to discuss the incident and to offer an apology. The student, who has not been publicly identified, also apologized during the meeting.
  • “I don’t think the Law School should have rules that are stricter than the Constitution of the United States,” said Dennis M. Patterson, a professor.
  • Professor Lopez and his co-dean, Kimberly Mutcherson, said in a statement that the discussion underway had nothing to do with “stifling academic freedom, ignoring the First Amendment, or banning words.”
  • Rather, they said, it was about “how best to create classroom environments in which all of our students feel seen, heard, valued and respected.”
  • “He said, um — and I’ll use a racial word, but it’s a quote,” the student said, according to a summary of the incident written by professors. “He says, ‘I’m going to go to Trenton and come back with my [expletive]s.”
  • The controversy began on Oct. 28, after a criminal law class all first-year students are required to take. In discussing the circumstances under which a criminal defendant could be held liable for crimes committed by his co-conspirators, the student repeated a quote from a defendant that appeared in an opinion written by a former State Supreme Court judge, Alan B. Handler.
  • Samantha Harris, the lawyer representing the woman, said the school would be abdicating its responsibility to train lawyers if it encouraged professors to avoid epithets in all contexts.
  • “When you’re an attorney, you hear all kinds of horrible things,” said Ms. Harris, a former fellow at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
  • dam Scales, a Black professor at Rutgers Law who has signed the statement of support for Professor Bergelson, said he opposed even voluntary limits on speech. But he said the number of his colleagues who believe racial epithets should never be spoken, regardless of the context, is “not insignificant.”
  • “You represent people who have said horrible things, who have done horrible things,” she said. “You can’t guarantee a world free of offensive language.”
  • The faculty discussions, held by videoconference, have been fraught, he said.
  • “I can’t imagine a less hospitable setting than a 100-person Zoom call to discuss racism,” he said. “It’s a demoralizing time for everyone involved.”
  • “I certainly grew up in the shadow of this tragedy,” she said. “I am very sensitive to how a word can trigger painful episodes. I would never use the words in class.”Still, she said, other professors and students should be free to make their own choices.
  • Professor Bergelson, who emigrated from Moscow as an adult, said her belief that slurs rooted in racism, bigotry or misogyny should be avoided in class stems from her personal history. Her grandmother, she said, was a journalist who was executed in 1950 by the Stalin regime for associating with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Another relative was executed in 1952.
urickni

Russia Today: Its Progress Is Into the World Of Materialism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ld-of-materialism-the-old.html

shared by urickni on 07 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The picture which Mr. Brezhnev paints will be a flattering one to the Communist Party which, in its 59 years of rule, has transformed Russia from the most backward power Europe into a superpower.
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      Mr.Brezhnev was the former General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; this is important to understanding the transformation which Russia endured as a power, as a result of the spread of communism.
  • The Soviet Union now not only leads the United States in many basic categories but also leads the world. It last year produced 770 million short tons of coal against 643 million by the United States;
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      This has allowed the soviet Union to gain power, build a large navy, and stand equal to the US in nuclear arms
  • These are no small achievements for a party which started out with a furtive meeting in Minsk in March 1898, attended by nine persons representing six different revolutionary factions.
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      progression of communism and its positive effects, despite the status quo that it only produced negatives
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  • Physically, it is the Czar's old Russian Empire with certain major changes. On the eve of World War I, Nicholas II ruled a domain of 6.8 million square miles with a population of 139 million. It included Poland, semi‐independent Finland and the Baltic states.
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      state of Russia in the context of WWI
  • Lenin lost almost all the empire in the worst days of 1918‐19. But Germany's defeat and the end of civil war and intervention restored to the Bolsheviks most of Russia—minus Finland, Poland and the Baltic states.
  • Stalin restored the Empire after World War II.
  • Today the Kremlin holds direct sway over 8.6 million square miles. The population has risen to 250 million souls, as the Czar would have said. Even that great population figure falls shy of Soviet aspirations.
  • steadily dropping birthrate, a by‐product of Russian urbanization and that most chronic of Russian problems, overcrowded housing.
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      socio-economic problems coming to rise
  • All of Russia's ethnics are uneasy and unhappy. This one of the problems Mr. Brezhnev will not touch upon at the Party Congress. The issue is simple: a demand for ethnic and racial equality and justice. The Soviet Union divided into 15 “national republics” and many more ethnic regions and districts. But genuine equality does not exist.
  • Year after year Moscow purges poets, editors and party leaders in Tashkent, Kiev or Riga on charges of “bourgeois nationalism,” “feudal tendencies” “chauvinism.” In other words, for being local patriots.
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      in terms of historical significance, this ties into some of the consequences of fervent nationalism, that have been shared across many nations. Often, this further oppresses/marginalizes ethnic groups
  • no one ever purges Moscow of Great Russian chauvinism.
  • Mimeographs have circulated among young party members, the Communist Youth, calling for “purity of Russian blood” terms remarkably like Hitler Youth racist language.
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      historical negative socio-economic outcomes of the culture behind Russian communism
  • in the other Russia, the real Russia, antisemitism is chronic. Russia was the traditional home of the hateful prejudice. Many of Hitler's antisemitic fables were drawn from Russian sources. Today antisemitism is encouraged by official propagandists.
  • bout 150,000 Jews have migrated from the Soviet Union in recent years. The Soviet census lists something over two million cititzens as ethnic Jews.
  • The actual total is over three million, perhaps four. But many have assimilated or,prefer to conceal their true identity because of the discriminations—inability to enter the foreign services, the higher cadres of the party, the upper echelons of the army and other elite posts, including academic ones.
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      history of anti-semitism in Europe, how it spread from Russia to Germany
  • The Party Congress will emphasize the positive: the rise in the standard of living, or industrial wages now averaging 146 rubles (about $193) a month against 126 rubles five years ago. Meat consumption has risen; the average Russian ate 40 more eggs in 1974 than in 1970.
  • But no one will whisper about the private stores to which high party and Government officials have access
  • The Communist Party is organized from the bottom up. Small cells exist in every unit of Soviet society—office, factory, shop, school, institute, laboratory. These form a local organization directed by a party secretary, appointed by the district or republic secretary, all controlled by the Party Secretariat in Moscow. In theory, the Party Congress, meeting every three to five years, is the supreme authority. In reality, of course, the party is run by an inner oligarchy, the 12‐ to 14‐member Politburo.
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      reality of the structure of communism; at its roots, the faults become more evident
  • Not that the party bosses do not know the realities. They
  • They know the real Russia but they also know that to hang onto the ladder they must protect their flanks.
    • urickni
      urickni on 07 Oct 19
       
      final testament to the temporal political leadership in Russia and how it has played into the negative outcomes of communism/domestic relations
cartergramiak

Russian PM and government quit as Putin proposes constitutional changes | World news | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-that-would-weaken-successor

politics putin

shared by cartergramiak on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Vladimir Putin has embarked on a sweeping reshuffle of Russia’s leadership, accepting the resignation of Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and proposing constitutional amendments that would limit the power of a potential successor as president if he steps down in 2024.
  • The 67-year-old has in effect ruled Russia since 2000, making him the longest-serving leader since Stalin, and what he plans to do in 2024 remains the most important political question in the country.
  • “The main result of Putin’s speech: what idiots (and/or crooks) are all those who said that Putin would leave in 2024,” wrote Alexei Navalny, a vocal leader of Russia’s opposition.
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  • Under term limits, Putin left the presidency for four years in 2008 in a tumultuous period during which Russia fought a war in Georgia, faced growing anti-Kremlin protests, and failed to block a Nato intervention in Libya. By 2012, Putin was back, and his temporary replacement, Dmitry Medvedev, no longer seen as a viable successor in the long term.
Javier E

Why China Turned Against Alibaba's Jack Ma - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-jack-ma-alibaba.html

china stalinism entrepreneur economy politics history crisis culture policy

shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • A look beneath the surface shows a deeper and more troubling trend for both the Chinese government and the entrepreneurs who powered the country out of its economic dark ages over the past four decades.
  • While China has more billionaires than the United States and India combined, about 600 million of its people earn $150 a month or less. While consumption in the first 11 months of this year fell about 5 percent nationally, China’s luxury consumption is expected to grow nearly 50 percent this year compared with 2019.
  • Young college graduates, even those with degrees from the United States, face limited white-collar job prospects and low wages.
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  • Housing in the best cities has become too expensive for first-time buyers
  • Young people who have borrowed from a new generation of online lenders, like Mr. Ma’s Ant Group, have debts they increasingly resent.
  • For all of China’s economic success, a long-running resentment of the rich, sometimes called the wealthy-hating complex, has long bubbled below the surface. With Mr. Ma, it has emerged with a vengeance.
  • “An outstanding people’s billionaire like Jack Ma will definitely be hanged on top of the lamppost,”
  • The Communist Party seems more than willing to tap into that resentment. This could mean trouble ahead for entrepreneurs and private businesses
  • Some businesspeople say that the hostility toward Ant and Mr. Ma makes them wonder about the fundamental direction of the country.
  • “You can either have absolute control or you can have a dynamic, innovative economy,”
  • Mr. Ma has his own high-profile philanthropic projects, like several initiatives in rural education and a prize to help develop entrepreneurial talent in Africa.
  • He has long enjoyed a better reputation than his peers in manufacturing, real estate and other industries whose edge may derive from cultivating close government ties, ignoring the environmental rules or exploiting employees.
  • He is as famous for making bold statements and challenging the authorities. In 2003, he created Alipay, which later became part of Ant Group, putting his business empire square in the center of the state-controlled world of finance.
  • He sometimes subtly dared the government to punish his defiance. Regarding Ant’s business, he said on multiple occasions, “If the government needs it, I can give it to the government.” His top lieutenants repeated the line, too
  • . “Given what has happened, eventually Ant will have to be controlled or even majority owned by the state,” said Zhiwu Chen, an economist at the University of Hong Kong’s business school.
  • Today, Alibaba and its archrival, Tencent, control more personal data and are more intimately involved in everyday life in China than Google, Facebook and other American tech titans are in the United States.
  • Instead of disrupting the state system, the companies have cozied up to it. Sometimes they even help the authorities track people. Still, the government has increasingly seen their size and influence as a threat.
  • some pro-market people in China worry that the country is drifting toward the hard line of the 1950s, when the party eliminated the capital class, using language that compared capitalist leanings to impurities, flaws and weaknesses.
  • To these people, some of the language recently used by Eric Jing, Ant’s chairman, evoked the era. At a conference on Dec. 15, he said the company was “looking into the mirror, finding out our shortcomings and conducting a bodily checkup.”
Javier E

Opinion | America and the Coronavirus: 'A Colossal Failure of Leadership' - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-united-states.html

us failure pandemic response leadership trump history policy

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • One of the most lethal leadership failures in modern times unfolded in South Africa in the early 2000s as AIDS spread there under President Thabo Mbeki.Mbeki scorned science, embraced conspiracy theories, dithered as the disease spread and rejected lifesaving treatments. His denialism cost about 330,000 lives, a Harvard study found
  • “We’re unfortunately in the same place,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “Mbeki surrounded himself with sycophants and cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives by ignoring science, and we’re suffering the same fate.”
  • “I see it as a colossal failure of leadership,” said Larry Brilliant, a veteran epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox in the 1970s. “Of the more than 200,000 people who have died as of today, I don’t think that 50,000 would have died if it hadn’t been for the incompetence.”
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  • There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.
  • As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.
  • Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.
  • “It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”
  • in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.
  • the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.
  • Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.
  • The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.
  • It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.
  • Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”
  • When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.
  • If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.
  • In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.
  • That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.
  • the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.
  • It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.
  • t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.
  • In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.
  • Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.
  • Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.
  • Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.
  • The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.
  • A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach
  • Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”
  • A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.
  • A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.
  • Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics
  • It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.
  • Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.
  • This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.
  • Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.
  • Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks
  • More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide
  • So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.
  • The rejection of science has also exacerbated polarization and tribalism
  • An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.
  • During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization
  • More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found
  • Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”
  • It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives
  • And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.
  • “It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.
Javier E

Opinion | A new Churchill biography wrongly leans into his faults - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ll-biography-misguided-history

churchill biography morality assessment history Culture

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • “Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road,” G.K. Chesterton said, “but drawing life from them, like a root.”
  • Wheatcroft seems like a single Lilliputian attempting to tie down Gulliver with a single thread. As with Jefferson, the thread will not hold. Such historical figures are more than bit players in our own morality play
  • This is a historical case in which “other than that” doesn’t work. You cannot justifiably say: He was a racist — other than saving Western civilization from an endless night of racist tyranny
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  • And from 1940 to 1945, he stood alone, and then with the United States, to (yes) save the liberty of the world.
  • From 1935 to 1940, as a failed and isolated politician, Churchill was utterly, repeatedly right about the dual threat of German aggression and British pacifism
  • Then, two extraordinary achievements
  • the main accusation against Churchill — like the main accusation against Jefferson — is racism. Did Churchill’s imperialism postulate that the Britons were among the “higher-grade races”? And did this contribute to his disdain for Indians and others? The answer to both questions is yes — with the recognition that such attitudes were not far removed from those of American imperialists in the 1890s who assumed the “White man’s burden” in the Philippines. (Theodore Roosevelt was also a firm believer in racial hierarchy.)
  • The charge that he had a blind spot about India the size of a subcontinent is baked. (“I am quite satisfied with my views on India,” he said, “and I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indians.”)
  • The charge that he maliciously caused the Bengal famine — in the sense that Joseph Stalin caused the Ukrainian famine — seems half-baked.
  • To me, the charge that the author of Gallipoli and Narvik could display terrible military judgment is baked.
  • My best advice is to read the book alongside Andrew Roberts’s invaluable “Churchill: Walking With Destiny” and judge for yourself.
  • Wheatcroft puts every baked and half-baked leftist criticism in one place.
  • a revisionist biography by Geoffrey Wheatcroft titled “Churchill’s Shadow.” Wheatcroft portrays Churchill as the sum of his misjudgments and the embodiment of imperial bigotry
Javier E

The Decision That Cost Hitler the War - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-simms-charlie-laderman.html

japan hitler wwII US history

shared by Javier E on 20 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • He was also sure that the United States would enter the war against him sooner or later. He thought the only solution was pre-emptive: to get control of enough oil and food from the Soviet Union to enable Germany to hold its own against Anglo-America in a long war.
  • the only alternative he saw to immediate war on the United States was slow but certain strangulation at Anglo-American hands. With a nod to an epigram from A. J. P. Taylor, Simms and Laderman offer this summation: “Hitler committed suicide for fear of dying.”
  • Early December 1941 is the moment of the war in which plausible alternate scenarios seemed to loom the largest
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  • What if Vichy France and Fascist Italy had drawn closer together in a “Latin front,” as they were discussing at the time?
  • What if the Japanese had attacked the British in Malaya and Singapore but not attacked the United States?
  • What if the German who spied for the Soviet Union in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had not supplied his masters with accurate information on Japanese plans, allowing Stalin to move 20 divisions from the east and redeploy them to Moscow for the shattering counterattack of Dec. 5?
  • The other thing the book does effectively is to pay careful attention to how the timing of events played out around the world, especially in the pattern of reactions to Pearl Harbor.
  • One of the last surprises in this book is how many world leaders saw accurately from that moment how the future would unfold.
Javier E

Bristling Against the West, China Rallies Domestic Sympathy for Russia - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-russia-ukraine.html

china ideology sympathy russia indoctrination West

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  • While Russian troops have battered Ukraine, officials in China have been meeting behind closed doors to study a Communist Party-produced documentary that extols President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a hero.
  • The humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, the video says, was the result of efforts by the United States to destroy its legitimacy. With swelling music and sunny scenes of present-day Moscow, the documentary praises Mr. Putin for restoring Stalin’s standing as a great wartime leader and for renewing patriotic pride in Russia’s past.
  • To the world, China casts itself as a principled onlooker of the war in Ukraine, not picking sides, simply seeking peace. At home, though, the Chinese Communist Party is pushing a campaign that paints Russia as a long-suffering victim rather than an aggressor and defends China’s strong ties with Moscow as vital.
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  • Chinese universities have organized classes to give students a “correct understanding” of the war, often highlighting Russia’s grievances with the West. Party newspapers have run series of commentaries blaming the United States for the conflict.
  • Mr. Xi has given that tale a more urgent, ominous spin. In doing so, he has embraced Mr. Putin as a fellow authoritarian lined up against Western dominance, demonstrating to the Chinese people that Mr. Xi has a partner in his cause.
  • “The most powerful weapon possessed by the West is, aside from nuclear weapons, the methods they use in ideological struggle,”
  • Since the demise of the Soviet Union, it says, “some countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Transcaucasia have become forward positions for the West to contain and meddle in Russia.”
  • It describes Mr. Putin as cleansing Russia of the political toxins that killed the Soviet Union.
  • In 2013, propaganda officials under Mr. Xi put out a documentary on the lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This latest take offers an even more conspiratorial interpretation
  • They regard China and Russia as both menaced by “color revolution,” the party’s phrase for insurrections backed by Western governments
  • “They actually believe their own narrative about color revolutions and tend to see this whole situation as a U.S.-led color revolution to overthrow Putin,”
  • “Both domestically and internationally, Xi has been pedaling this dark narrative since he took power,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. “It allows him to justify his accumulation of power and the changes he’s made by creating this sense of struggle and danger.”
  • The Biden administration has cast the war as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism. Chinese officials are mounting a counternarrative that American-led domineering is the source of conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere.
  • The documentary attributes the decline of the Soviet Union to political liberalization, especially what Beijing calls “historical nihilism,” or emphasizing the Communist Party’s mistakes and misdeeds. It accuses historians critical of the Soviet revolution of fabricating estimated death tolls by many millions for Stalin’s purges.
  • Stalin, it argues, was a modernizing leader whose purges went too far but initially “were something of a necessity” given the threats to Soviet rule. It suggests that rock music and modern fashion were symptoms of the moral rot that later set in.
  • “They’ve taken only one lesson from all of this, and that is you do not allow any freedom of expression,”
  • Previous leaders in Moscow — above all Mr. Gorbachev and Nikita S. Khrushchev — are portrayed as dupes, bewitched by the siren song of liberal reform and Western superiority.
  • Officials overseeing the screenings are often described in official notices as calling for cadres to maintain firm loyalty to Mr. Xi.
  • “Loving a party and its leader is not a cult of personality,”
  • Chinese leaders have been debating why the Soviet Union fell apart ever since it dissolved in 1991. More than his predecessors, Mr. Xi has blamed the Soviet Union’s breakup on lack of ideological spine and Western political subversion.
  • “If you have the worldview that you see in this documentary, you could tell yourself the story that the Russians are facing a real threat from the West,”
  • Political loyalty has become more crucial to Mr. Xi as Beijing tries to contain Covid outbreaks with stringent lockdowns, and manage a slowing economy. China’s foreign policy is under scrutiny, after some Chinese scholars posted essays criticizing Beijing’s refusal to condemn Mr. Putin.
  • Universities and colleges have organized indoctrination lectures for students, suggesting that officials are worried that young, educated Chinese may be receptive to the criticisms that Beijing has been too indulgent of Mr. Putin.
  • “There’s an ‘either we hang together or we hang separately’ attitude that comes into play,” Mr. Johnson, the former C.I.A. analyst, said of Chinese leaders. “If it’s a strong nationalist approach, then who in the party doesn’t want to be a good nationalist?”
Javier E

Bill Clinton: I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629499

clinton russia foreign policy

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  • When I first became president, I said that I would support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states. My policy was to work for the best while preparing for the worst.
  • Lately, NATO expansion has been criticized in some quarters for provoking Russia and even laying the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The expansion certainly was a consequential decision, one that I continue to believe was correct.
  • As United Nations ambassador and later secretary of state, my friend Madeleine Albright, who recently passed away, was an outspoken supporter of NATO expansion. So were Secretary of State Warren Christopher; National Security Adviser Tony Lake; his successor, Sandy Berger; and two others with firsthand experience in the area:
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  • When my administration started, in 1993, no one felt certain that a post–Cold War Europe would remain peaceful, stable, and democratic.
  • in my view, whether it happened depended less on NATO and more on whether Russia remained a democracy and how it defined its greatness in the 21st century. Would it build a modern economy based on its human talent in science, technology, and the arts, or seek to re-create a version of its 18th-century empire fueled by natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian government with a powerful military?
  • In 1994, Russia became the first country to join the Partnership for Peace, a program for practical bilateral cooperation, including joint training exercises between NATO and non-NATO European countries.
  • Beginning in 1995, after the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War, we made an agreement to add Russian troops to the peacekeeping forces that NATO had on the ground in Bosnia. In 1997, we supported the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which gave Russia a voice but not a veto in NATO affairs, and supported Russia’s entry to the G7, making it the G8. In 1999, at the end of the Kosovo conflict, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen reached an agreement with the Russian defense minister under which Russian troops could join UN-sanctioned NATO peacekeeping forces.
  • Throughout it all, we left the door open for Russia’s eventual membership in NATO, something I made clear to Yeltsin and later confirmed to his successor, Vladimir Putin.
  • Yes, NATO expanded despite Russia’s objections, but expansion was about more than the U.S. relationship with Russia.
  • Big questions remained about East Germany’s integration with West Germany, whether old conflicts would explode across the continent as they did in the Balkans, and how former Warsaw Pact nations and newly independent Soviet republics would seek security, not just against the threat of Russian invasion, but from one another and from conflicts within their borders.
  • Now Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, far from casting the wisdom of NATO expansion into doubt, proves that this policy was necessary
  • The possibility of EU and NATO membership provided the greatest incentives for Central and Eastern European states to invest in political and economic reforms and abandon a go-it-alone strategy of militarization.
  • Neither the EU nor NATO could stay within the borders Stalin had imposed in 1945. Many countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain were seeking greater freedom, prosperity, and security with the EU and NATO
  • As Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, tweeted in December 2021, “It wasn’t NATO seeking to go East, it was former Soviet satellites and republics wishing to go West.”
  • Or as Havel said in 2008: “Europe is no longer, and must never again be, divided over the heads of its people and against their will into any spheres of interest or influence.” To reject Central and Eastern European countries’ membership into NATO simply because of Russian objections would have been doing just that.
  • Enlarging NATO required unanimous consent of the alliance’s then-16 members; two-thirds consent of a sometimes skeptical U.S. Senate; close consultation with prospective members to ensure that their military, economic, and political reforms met NATO’s high standards; and near-constant reassurance to Russia.
  • Madeleine Albright excelled at every step. Indeed, few diplomats have ever been so perfectly suited for the times they served as Madeleine
  • She understood that the end of the Cold War provided the chance to build a Europe free, united, prosperous, and secure for the first time since nation-states arose on the continent. As UN ambassador and secretary of state, she worked to realize that vision and to beat back the religious, ethnic, and other tribal divisions that threatened it. She used every item in her famed diplomat’s toolkit and her domestic political savvy to help clear the way for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to join NATO in 1999.
  • The result has been more than two decades of peace and prosperity for an ever-larger portion of Europe and a strengthening of our collective security.
  • At the time I proposed NATO expansion, however, there was a lot of respected opinion on the other side.
  • Russia under Putin clearly would not have been a content status quo power in the absence of expansion. It wasn’t an immediate likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO that led Putin to invade Ukraine twice—in 2014 and in February—but rather the country’s shift toward democracy that threatened his autocratic power at home, and a desire to control the valuable assets beneath the Ukrainian soil.
  • And it is the strength of the NATO alliance, and its credible threat of defensive force, that has prevented Putin from menacing members from the Baltics to Eastern Europe.
  • Anne Applebaum said recently, “The expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only truly successful, piece of American foreign policy of the last 30 years … We would be having this fight in East Germany right now if we hadn’t done it.”
  • The failure of Russian democracy, and its turn to revanchism, was not catalyzed in Brussels at NATO headquarters. It was decided in Moscow by Putin.
Javier E

How Russians justify their support for the war - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...en-russians-existential-choice

support war russia putin paranoid suicide trauma survival

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  • whether it is “Biden’s war” or Putin’s, Russians have rallied around the flag, and most likely that’s because the Kremlin has led them to see the war as an existential choice: Either you win it, or your life is going to be destroyed.
  • The available evidence shows significant support for the war, as well as a surge in patriotism.
  • According to the Levada Center, a respected independent pollster, the number of Russians who thought the country was going in the right direction rose from 52 percent before the invasion to 69 percent after, and Putin’s personal approval rating soared to a whopping 83 percent
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  • As an experiment staged by researchers at the London School of Economics showed, support for the war goes down by 15 percentage points when people are encouraged to speak their mind.
  • In a joint project with the Ukrainian pollster KIIS, the Levada Center for years has asked Russians what kind of relations they envisioned between their country and Ukraine. In a poll conducted in December, only 18 percent of Russians said they wanted the two countries to become one, while 51 percent said they wanted Russia and Ukraine to be independent countries with an open border, and 24 percent said they wanted independent countries with a hard border.
  • In a Levada Center poll published on the day Putin launched the invasion, only 25 percent of Russians supported Russia’s expanding its borders to include the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics — Donbas, where much of the heaviest fighting is concentrated now — while 33 percent wanted the region to become independent and 26 percent wanted it to remain part of Ukraine.
  • It’s hard to deny that the war is fratricidal, however, and that would seem to make selling it to the public more difficult. How can you flatten Ukrainian cities where millions of Russians have relatives and friends?
  • The pattern of deeply intertwined relationships extends into broader Russian society. Having some kind of connection across the border is the norm, not the exception.
  • So how do Russians justify support of what so far has been a series of crimes against humanity committed against a people who are the transnational-relationship equivalent of next of kin?
  • The Kremlin employs two related narratives here. The first paints the enemy as the West, not Ukraine. This framing turns Russia into the smaller, weaker side in the conflict — a victim, not a perpetrator.
  • Medinsky the negotiator, who is better known in Russia as an architect of the historical narratives promoted by Putin’s regime, expresses the second framing best: “Russia’s very existence is at stake now,” he said last month. Russia, in this telling, is going through a period like the one that led to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, or the one when the Soviet system was falling apart in the early 1990s.
  • Messages aimed at triggering the survival instinct are extremely powerful in Russia, where various invasions from the West, including Adolf Hitler’s attempt at exterminating eastern Slavs as a race, define the historical experience
  • There is a mode of Russian collective behavior in the face of mortal danger: People forget their old grievances and rally behind the leader, even one hated by many. This is what happened in 1941, when the victims and perpetrators of communist genocide united under Joseph Stalin to repel the existential threat posed by the Nazis.
  • Russians are not facing an existential threat now, of course. Rather, it is their own country that’s posing an existential threat to a neighbor. But the human tendency is to grasp for comforting, rather than truthful, narratives.
  • It takes something along the lines of Germany’s defeat in World War II to accept reality. It also takes decades, rather than years or months.
  • Freed from its totalitarian prison in 1991, Russian society emerged badly traumatized by a century of outright genocide and bleak Soviet existence. It was re-traumatized by the turmoil of the 1990s
  • They remain oblivious to the fact that the more they deny reality, the worse will be the future trauma.
  • Unlike Ukrainians, Russians don’t even have the illusion of the West embracing and integrating them after this conflict. Pro-Putin Russians assume that all the West wants is to punish them, so they’ll try their best to postpone this punishment or prevent it altogether.
  • When Putin says Russians and Ukrainians are one people and then — in the next breath — begins slaughtering these people en masse, he is unleashing civil war, by his own logic. For now, that is confined to a neighboring country.
  • some pro-Kremlin commentators, including the editor of a key history journal and a well-known writer, have recently taken to branding members of the Russian opposition “internal Ukrainians.” The implication is that anti-Putin Russians should be treated with the same cruelty as Ukrainians, because they want to destroy Russia
  • Russians face few choices that don’t lead to self-destruction. The West might be thinking that by increasing economic and military pressure, it will achieve a behavioral change, and perhaps even a collapse of Putin’s regime, but it may just as well cause the opposite, uniting people in what they see as an apocalyptic battle for survival.
  • This war bought him a few more years in power. He paralyzed the resistance to his regime by turning his supporters into accomplices in war crimes and those who oppose him into enemies of the state. He doesn’t really need to occupy Ukraine; he needs the war per se.
  • without a clearly spelled-out vision of a post-Putin Russia fully integrated into the West — the kind of vision that inspires Ukrainians to fight against Putin — the vector of Russian society will remain fratricidal and, increasingly, suicidal. This is bad news for everyone on the planet, given that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is capable of destroying humanity. As Putin once put it: “Why do we need the world if there is no Russia in it?”
Javier E

What Christopher Hitchens Knew - by Matt Johnson - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...what-christopher-hitchens-knew

hitchens history culture politics enlightenment

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • Hitchens’s style of left-wing radicalism is now out of fashion, but it has a long and venerable history: George Orwell’s unwavering opposition to totalitarianism and censorship, Bayard Rustin’s advocacy for universal civil rights without appealing to tribalism and identity politics, the post-communist anti-totalitarianism that emerged on the European left in the second half of the twentieth century.
  • Hitchens described himself as a “First Amendment absolutist,
  • Hitchens’ most fundamental political and moral conviction was universalism. He loathed nationalism and argued that the international system should be built around a “common standard for justice and ethics”
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  • Hitchens argued that unfettered free speech and inquiry would always make civil society stronger. When he wrote the introduction to his collection of essays For the Sake of Argument in 1993, he had a specific left-wing tradition in mind: the left of Orwell and Victor Serge and C.L.R. James, which simultaneously opposed Stalinism, fascism, and imperialism in the twentieth century, and which stood for “individual and collective emancipation, self-determination and internationalism.”
  • he argued that these values are for export. Hitchens believed in universal human rights. This is why, at a time when his comrades were still manning the barricades against the “imperial” West after the Cold War, he argued that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should intervene to stop a genocidal assault on Bosnia. It’s why he argued that American power could be used to defend human rights and promote democracy.
  • He didn’t just despise religion because he regarded it as a form of totalitarianism—he also recognized that it’s an infinitely replenishable wellspring of tribal hatred.
  • He also opposed identity politics, because he didn’t think our social and civic lives should be reduced to rigid categories based on melanin, X chromosomes, and sexuality.
  • He recognized that the Enlightenment values of individual rights, freedom of expression and conscience, humanism, pluralism, and democracy are universal—they provide the most stable, just, and rational foundation for any civil society, whether they’re observed in America or Europe or Iraq.
  • As many on the Western left built their politics around incessant condemnations of their own societies as racist, exploitative, oligarchic, and imperialistic, Hitchens recognized the difference between self-criticism and self-flagellation.
  • Hitchens closes his book Why Orwell Matters with the following observation: “What he [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.”
  • One of the reasons Orwell accumulated many left-wing enemies in his time was the fact that his criticisms of his own “side” were grounded in authentic left-wing principles
  • he criticized the left-wing intellectuals who enjoy “seeing their own country humiliated” and “follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong.” Among some of these intellectuals, Orwell wrote: “One finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of the Western countries.”
  • This is a predictable manifestation of what the American political theorist Michael Walzer calls the “default position” of the left: a purportedly “anti-imperialist and anti-militarist” position inclined toward the view that “everything that goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.”
  • the tendency to ignore and rationalize even the most egregious violence and authoritarianism abroad in favor of an obsessive emphasis on the crimes and blunders of Western governments has become a reflex.
  • Much of the left has been captured by a strange mix of sectarian and authoritarian impulses: a myopic emphasis on identitarianism and group rights over the individual; an orientation toward subjectivity and tribalism over objectivity and universalism; and demands for political orthodoxy enforced by repressive tactics like the suppression of speech.
  • These left-wing pathologies are particularly corrosive today because they give right-wing nationalists and populists on both sides of the Atlantic—whose rise over the past several years has been characterized by hostility to democratic norms and institutions, rampant xenophobia, and other forms of illiberalism—an opportunity to claim that those who oppose them are the true authoritarians.
  • He understood that the left could only defeat these noxious political forces by rediscovering its best traditions: support for free expression, pluralism, and universalism—the values of the Enlightenment.
  • He believed in the concept of global citizenship, which is why he firmly supported international institutions like the European Union
  • Despite the pervasive idea that Hitchens exchanged one set of convictions for another by the end of his life, his commitment to his core principles never wavered.
Javier E

(2) What Was the 'Soviet Century'? - by André Forget - Bulwark+ - 0 views

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soviet russia culture policy crisis history politics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 23 - No Cached
  • Schlögel makes the argument that the Soviet Union is best understood not primarily as the manifestation of rigid Communist ideology, but as an attempt to transform an agrarian peasant society into a fully modern state
  • “A ‘Marxist theory,’” he writes, “yields very little for an understanding of the processes of change in postrevolutionary Russia. We get somewhat nearer the mark if we explore the scene of a modernization without modernity and of a grandiose civilizing process powered by forces that were anything but civil.” In other words, the interminable debates about whether Lenin was the St. Paul of communism or its Judas Iscariot are beside the point: As a Marxist might put it, the history of the Soviet Union is best explained by material conditions.
  • the story one pieces together from his chapters goes something like this. In the years between 1917 and 1945, the Russian Empire ceased to be a semi-feudal aristocracy governed by an absolutist monarch whose rule rested on divine right, and became an industrialized state. It dammed rivers, electrified the countryside, built massive factories and refineries, collectivized agriculture, raised literacy rates, set up palaces of culture, created a modern military, and made the Soviet Union one of the most powerful countries in the world. In the course of doing so, it sent some of its best minds into exile, crippled its system of food production, set up a massive network of prison camps, watched millions of its citizens die of hunger, killed hundreds of thousands more through slave labor and forced relocation, and executed a generation of revolutionary leaders. It did all this while surviving one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century and the largest land invasion in history.
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  • Over the next forty-five years, it tried to establish a solid basis for growth and prosperity. It launched an ambitious housing program to create living spaces for its massive and rapidly urbanizing population, and to nurture the growth of a Soviet middle class that had access to amenities and luxury goods. At the same time, it systematically blocked this new middle class from exercising its creative faculties outside a narrow range of approved topics and ideological formulas, and it could not reliably ensure that if someone wanted to buy a winter coat in December, they could find it in the shop. It created a state with the resources and technology to provide for the needs of its citizens, but that was unable to actually deliver the goods.
  • The USSR moved forward under the weight of these contradictions, first sprinting, then staggering, until it was dismantled by another revolution, one that was orchestrated by the very class of party elites the first one had produced. But the states that emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the people who lived in them, had undergone a profound change in the process.
  • Schlögel argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a “new Soviet person” (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it,The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born. The “Homo Sovieticus” was no fiction to be casually mocked but a reality with whom we usually only start to engage in earnest when we realize that analyzing the decisions of the Central Committee is less crucial than commonly assumed
  • Placing the emphasis on modernization rather than ideology allows Schlögel to delineate oft-ignored parallels and connections between the USSR and the United States. In the 1930s, especially, there was a great deal of cultural and technical collaboration between U.S. citizens and their Soviet counterparts, which led to what Hans Rogger called “Soviet Americanism” (sovetsky amerikanizm). “In many respects,” Schlögel writes, Soviet citizens “felt closer to America; America had left behind the class barriers and snobbery of Old Europe. America was less hierarchical; you could rise socially, something otherwise possible only in postrevolutionary Russia, where class barriers had broken down and equality had been universally imposed by brute force.”
  • As each rose to a position of global economic, political, and military predominance, the British Empire and the United States divided the world into “white” people, who had certain inalienable rights, and “colored” people who did not. The USSR, rising later and faster, made no such distinctions. An Old Bolshevik who had served the revolution for decades was just as likely to end their life freezing on the taiga as a Russian aristocrat or a Kazakh peasant.
  • Pragmatism and passion were certainly present in the development of the USSR, but they were not the only inputs. Perhaps the crucial factor was the almost limitless cheap labor supplied by impoverished peasants driven off their land, petty criminals, and political undesirables who could be press-ganged into service as part of their “reeducation.”
  • Between 1932 and 1937, the output of the Dalstroy mine went from 511 kilograms of gold to 51.5 tons. The price of this astonishing growth was paid by the bodies of the prisoners, of whom there were 163,000 by the end of the decade. The writer Varlam Shalamov, Schlögel’s guide through this frozen Malebolge, explains it this way:To turn a healthy young man, who had begun his career in the clean winter air of the gold mines, into a goner, all that was needed, at a conservative estimate, was a term of twenty to thirty days of sixteen hours of work per day, with no rest days, with systematic starvation, torn clothes, and nights spent in temperatures of minus sixty degrees in a canvas tent with holes in it, and being beaten by the foremen, the criminal gang masters, and the guards.
  • There is no moral calculus that can justify this suffering. And yet Schlögel lays out the brutal, unassimilable fact about the violence of Soviet modernization in the 1930s: “Without the gold of Kolyma . . . there would have been no build-up of the arms industries before and during the Soviet-German war.” The lives of the workers in Kolyma were the cost of winning the Second World War as surely as those of the soldiers at the front.
  • Of the 250,000 people, most of them prisoners,1 involved in building the 227-kilometer White Sea Canal, around 12,800 are confirmed to have died in the process. Even if the actual number is higher, as it probably is, it is hardly extraordinary when set against the 28,000 people who died in the construction of the 80-kilometer Panama Canal (or the 20,000 who had died in an earlier, failed French attempt to build it), or the tens of thousands killed digging the Suez Canal
  • it is worth noting that slave labor in mines and building projects, forced starvation of millions through food requisitions, and the destruction of traditional lifeworlds were all central features of the colonial projects that underwrote the building of modernity in the U.S. and Western Europe. To see the mass death caused by Soviet policies in the first decades of Communist rule in a global light—alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas, and the great famines in South Asia—is to see it not as the inevitable consequence of socialist utopianism, but of rapid modernization undertaken without concern for human life.
  • But Soviet Americanism was about more than cultural affinities. The transformation of the Soviet Union would have been impossible without American expertise.
  • Curiously enough, Schlögel seems to credit burnout from the era of hypermobilization for the fall of the USSR:Whole societies do not collapse because of differences of opinion or true or false guidelines or even the decisions of party bosses. They perish when they are utterly exhausted and human beings can go on living only if they cast off or destroy the conditions that are killing them
  • it seems far more accurate to say that the USSR collapsed the way it did because of a generational shift. By the 1980s, the heroic generation was passing away, and the new Soviet people born in the post-war era were comparing life in the USSR not to what it had been like in the bad old Tsarist days, but to what it could be like
  • Schlögel may be right that “Pittsburgh is not Magnitogorsk,” and that the U.S. was able to transition out of the heroic period of modernization far more effectively than the USSR. But the problems America is currently facing are eerily similar to those of the Soviet Union in its final years—a sclerotic political system dominated by an aging leadership class, environmental degradation, falling life expectancy, a failed war in Afghanistan, rising tensions between a traditionally dominant ethnic group and freedom-seeking minorities, a population that has been promised a higher standard of living than can be delivered by its economic system.
  • given where things stand in the post-Soviet world of 2023, the gaps tell an important story. The most significant one is around ethnic policy, or what the Soviet Union referred to as “nation-building” (natsional‘noe stroitel‘stvo).
  • In the more remote parts of the USSR, where national consciousness was still in the process of developing, it raised the more profound question of which groups counted as nations. When did a dialect become a language? If a nation was tied to a clearly demarcated national territory, how should the state deal with nomadic peoples?
  • The Bolsheviks dealt with this last problem by ignoring it. Lenin believed that “nationality” was basically a matter of language, and language was simply a medium for communication.
  • Things should be “national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin famously put it. Tatar schools would teach Tatar children about Marx and Engels in Tatar, and a Kyrgyz novelist like Chinghiz Aitmatov could write socialist realist novels in Kyrgyz.
  • Unity would be preserved by having each nationality pursue a common goal in their own tongue. This was the reason Lenin did not believe that establishing ethno-territorial republics would lead to fragmentation of the Soviet state
  • Despite these high and earnest ideals, the USSR’s nationalities policy was as filled with tragedy as the rest of Soviet history. Large numbers of intellectuals from minority nations were executed during the Great Purge for “bourgeois nationalism,” and entire populations were subject to forced relocation on a massive scale.
  • In practice, Soviet treatment of national minorities was driven not by a commitment to self-determination, but by the interests (often cynical, sometimes paranoid) of whoever happened to be in the Kremlin.
  • The ethnic diversity of the USSR was a fundamental aspect of the lifeworlds of millions of Soviet citizens, and yet Schlögel barely mentions it.
  • As is often the case with books about the Soviet Union, it takes life in Moscow and Leningrad to be representative of the whole. But as my friends in Mari El used to say, “Moscow is another country.”
  • None of this would matter much if it weren’t for the fact that the thirty years since the dismantling of the USSR have been defined in large part by conflicts between and within the successor states over the very questions of nationality and territory raised during the founding of the Soviet Union.
  • in the former lands of the USSR, barely a year has gone since 1991 without a civil war, insurgency, or invasion fought over control of territory or control of the government of that territory in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.
  • Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 euthanized any remaining hopes that globalization and integration of trade would establish a lasting peace in Eastern Europe. The sense of possibility that animates Schlögel’s meditations on post-Soviet life—the feeling that the lifeworld of kommunalkas and queues had given way to a more vivacious, more dynamic, more forward-looking society that was bound to sort itself out eventually—now belongs definitively to the past. Something has been broken that cannot be fixed.
  • It is worth noting (Schlögel does not) that of the institutions that survived the dismantling of the Soviet state, the military and intelligence services and the criminal syndicates were the most powerful, in large part because they were so interconnected. In a kind of Hegelian shit-synthesis, the man who established a brutal kind of order after the mayhem of the nineteen-nineties, Vladimir Putin, has deep ties to both. The parts of Soviet communism that ensured a basic standard of living were, for the most part, destroyed in the hideously bungled transition to a market economy. Militarism, chauvinism, and gangster capitalism thrived, as they still do today.
  • Perhaps it is now possible to see the Soviet century as an anomaly in world history, an interregnum during which two power blocks, each a distorted reflection of the other, marshaled the energies of a modernizing planet in a great conflict over the future. The United States and the USSR both preached a universal doctrine, both claimed they were marching toward the promised land.
  • The unipolar moment lasted barely a decade, and we have now fallen through the rotten floor of American hegemony to find ourselves once again in the fraught nineteenth century. The wars of today are not between “smelly little orthodoxies,” but between empires and nations, the powerful states that can create their own morality and the small countries that have to find powerful friends
  • the key difference between 2023 and 1900 is that the process of modernization is, in large parts of the world, complete. What this means for great-power politics in the twenty-first century, we are only beginning to understand.
Javier E

War and Consequences in Ukraine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673792

dehumanization mass murder human nature dark consequences

shared by Javier E on 01 May 23 - No Cached
  • “The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbors and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature.”
  • Her book Red Famine is the definitive study of Stalin’s calculated starvation of Ukraine. Anne’s work on that catastrophe prepared her to write about Ukraine’s latest calamity
  • The war in Ukraine is about much more than Ukraine; it is about the very subjects that animate this magazine: democracy, freedom, justice, humanism.
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